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Eilís Lawlor is the acting head of the Valuing What Matters team at nef.
The Marmot report has made it clear – for better social wellbeing we must eradicate disparities in education, income and health.
Successive reviews and reports have consistently told us two things: that we live in an increasingly polarised society and that this is damaging to our social wellbeing. The latest – yesterday’s Marmot review – supports a widely held view that inequalities of health, education, income and opportunity are all inter-related, and that better education leads to longer, healthier lives, and educational attainment itself is affected by income inequality.
Sir Michael Marmot was commissioned to review health inequalities but his recommendations range from investments in early years to an increase in the minimum wage. This comes hot on the heels of the National Equality Panel report on income inequality and the launch of policy positions by all three political parties on the issue. Inequality is no longer an embarrassing legacy of old Labour; instead, all three parties are now falling over themselves to profess their concern. This raises an intriguing question: after decades of tolerating the rise and maintenance of high inequalities, do we now face the prospect of an election fought around the issue?
Social problems are often economic in their origin, and reforming the system itself is the most powerful policy tool that we have at our disposal. A truly preventative approach starts with the structures and institutions that shape our lives: the destabilising income inequalities, the spatial concentrations of unemployment and poverty, the focus on growth as a proxy for social welfare to the neglect of other outcomes.
Late last year we at the new economics foundation produced a report that looked at the economic case for investing in early years. We calculated that by 2030 savings of about £400bn could be made in return for big investments now in universal childcare, extended parental leave and an holistic suite of preventative services. The response from policy-makers and commentators was that it was “too ambitious”. It is a sobering thought that it is too ambitious for one of the world’s biggest economies to aim for outcomes for children similar to its less well off European neighbours.
Inequality is not inevitable. But in the absence of countervailing forces trends such as globalisation, changing demographics and family structure will increase it. Yet, other countries manage to counteract these forces, whether it’s childcare in Sweden, education in the Netherlands, or land redistribution in South Korea. Labour has of course tried (a bit), and it has identified many of the right points of intervention. The problem is that it either didn’t go far enough (not indexing the minimum wage to incomes) or it left key drivers untouched (industrial policy).
Tackling inequality, at least in the public imagination, is overly synonymous with redistribution through the tax and benefit system. Discussion of the forces that influence different wages is notably absent, which might suggest that people think that the pre-tax distribution of incomes is broadly speaking “fair”. But the fact that a senior banker can earn 4,400 times what a nursery worker earns is not fair and is not an accident. It is in opening up this debate and in helping to highlight the determinants of inequality that the Marmot report is so welcome. The research is in, the arguments have been won, now it is time to act on them.
Eilís Lawlor is the acting head of the Valuing What Matters team at nef.

Denham is relaxed about the filthy rich, and now, it seems, about inequality too.
Imagine you are a Government minister whose party is dogged by accountability scandals, trailing badly in the polls and squarely in lame duck territory from a policy perspective. Imagine as well that you had recently taken (or been thrown) the reins of the department responsible for narrowing spatial inequalities but under which they had in fact widened. How would you frame a speech to set the tone for your tenure in this role?
Well if you are John Denham you clearly abdicate any responsibility for this fact by trying to claim that people don’t care about inequality anyway. Representative democracy has been brought low in recent times and many think it is on its knees. A cloying and calculated attendance to ‘middle class voters’ interests is hardly the shot in the arm it requires. The irony of Denham’s comments is that measures to tackle inequality under New Labour have been overwhelmingly focused on the poor because it was seen as more politically saleable, they were even famously (and oxymoronically) ‘intensely relaxed’ about people becoming ‘filthy rich’. Anyone who suggested otherwise was patronised into the political wilderness.
The hardest and arguably most important role a politician can play is to lead people where they fear to go, to promote a sense of shared purpose and collective responsibility amongst their constituency, even if the benefits are not immediately obvious. We know that inequality is bad for us all, rich and poor alike. John Denham and his advisors most likely know it too but don’t care to share it with the rest of us. There is a risk afterall, an inspirational speech on the issue might lose even more votes to the Conservatives. No, better to out-Tory them, appeal to narrow self-interest and perpetuate untruths about why redistribution matters. That’s the way to restore our faith in party politics.
Eilís Lawlor is the acting head of the Valuing What Matters team at nef
Results may not have been as bad as expected but still made for dismal reading in last week’s OECD report on inequality. At a time when the rewards of the rich are being called sharply into question, the UK still has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world and social mobility is static. The rate at which inequality has widened is slowing, which is not the same as the gap narrowing. What we already knew has been confirmed: the proceeds of the global economic boom that is now unravelling have gone disproportionately to the already wealthy.
Any equalisation of incomes, however small, is to be welcomed but the media coverage of this missed the most salient point of the report: the gap between rich and poor has grown in more than three-quarters of all OECD countries over the past two decades. Have we and our media become so complacent with wealth accumulation in the hands of the few that this is considered positive, or are we just desperate for some good news?